RYRAL is a realtime audio video performance by Tom DeFanti (creating computer animation with the GRaphics Symbiosis System or GRASS), Phil Morton (“up in the kitchen keepin’ track”), Dan Sandin (processing video with a Sandin Image Processor), Bob Snyder (performing experimental electronic music on an analog EMU synthesizer) and an uncredited dancer. This Media Art project was created and performed in April 1976 at the second Electronic Visualization Event (EVE II) in Chicago. EVE II took place at The University of Illinois Chicago.

Documentation of the performance was later exhibited by Diane Kirkpatrick in her exhibition Chicago: The City and Its Artists 1945-1978 at The University of Michigan Museum of Art March 17 – April 23 1978.

Phil Morton asked Dan Sandin if he could build the first copy of Sandin’s original Sandin Image Processor. Sandin and Morton then began to work together to create the schematic plans for the Sandin Image Processor, a document they called the Distribution Religion. Through The Distribution Religion, Sandin open sourced his Sandin Image Processor, giving the plans away for only the cost of making Xerox copies and mailing them while incorporating any additions or modifications made by those who built their own Sandin Image Processor into any further releases of the Distribution Religion.

In 2005 Chicago-based criticalartware group (of which i am a founding member and core.developer) released an archive of the Distribution Religion, converting the documents to digital formats and distributing them freely online as shared cultural resources in order to encourage and activate the present and futures of these Media Art Hystories. – jonCates